8th – A secure, cross-platform, concatenative programming language
Let's look at the license (https://8th-dev.com/com-license.html):
"Except as otherwise specifically permitted in this Agreement, you may not: [...] (h) publish any results of benchmark tests run on the Software to a third party without Licensor’s prior written consent"
So we know that it's slow as crap, which is especially problematic given the author's claims of suitability for embedded development, and the author also thinks that nobody's going to notice. (What's next, an NDA to get the proposed license?) There's not a big enough cup to hold all the nope.
Some questions:
* I see many claims of "cross-platform", but not a lot of substance to back it up. The FAQ is odd as well - it makes many claims that are simply not true.
* Given that you chose to keep the source closed, what guarantees will I have that your language will continue to be supported if the company collapses?
* What are you offering in a paid language that isn't already provided by an open alternative?
* What is the state of the standard library or library ecosystem? Will I end up writing my own dependencies?
Edit: Prior discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10344891
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3nthud/the_8th...
It has testimonials:
https://8th-dev.com/kudos.html
And eight pillars:
https://8th-dev.com/about8th.html
There's also a very detailed manual, that for some reason is hard to find on the website:
Been said on other HN-announced languages.. but good luck having a search engine find relevant results for that language name.
did you google the name before deciding on it? The term "8th" already has a well-established association that you might not want attached to your company:
There are lots of free-and-open-source languages already. A proprietary one seems like a non-starter to me.
> 8th lets you choose, and offers strong protection if needed. ... The build tool compress your program code and all its required bits and pieces into a ZIP-format blob which is unpacked, compiled and run on the device when needed. It is difficult to modify the ZIP-data without corrupting the deployment package.
I'm afraid to ask how the paid encryption works.
So I take it's supposed to be "twice as good as forth?"
Code example? Also, being a cross platform GUI as well, how does it compare with GTK, Qt (backed by a much larger company Nokia), Tk, etc.?
I wonder how much money they would be willing to bet on their big claims of security. Somehow I don't imagine it would last long in the hands of a dedicated individual.
At the risk of sounding negative may I ask, why would I even use a platform with really shady testimonials ( https://8th-dev.com/kudos.html ) and something that might have no future?
http://concatenative.org/ language wiki.
Nice to see the Factor repo is still getting commits.
If it isn't open source it doesn't matter.
From the FAQ:
>The main reason 8th is not GPL licensed is that I (Ron) have strong philosophical objections to being forced to give away my intellectual property. I disagree with the very tenet that "code should be free" in the GPL sense. Instead, I am of the opinion that you are free to have access to the 8th source code if you are willing to pay for that privilege. If not, not.
>A secondary reason we do not follow the "open source" idea is that, frankly, over the many years we have used open-source projects, we have been struck by the simple fact that a great many of those projects are maintained only to the extent the author decides to do so. Thus for example, the venerable "gcc" compiler has severe bugs which were reported many years ago, but which will probably never be fixed. This, despite the fact that the code for it is available and anyone could fix it at will. Nobody has, probably nobody will -- because the gcc code is extraordinarily difficult to grok. So the "many eyes" argument for open-source and GPL is not overly convincing to me.
"He developed the well respected Reva Forth, used by hobbyists around the world. "
Reva Forth always seemed nice but I could never get it working on anything other than Windows.
As such, I have little faith that "8th" will place any value on portability either, e.g., that it will be ported to BSD, Plan 9 or other RPi-compatible OS.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of more portable, open source Forths to choose from.
Example:
Some HN commenters are questioning the peculiar security claims.ftp -4o cforthu.zip https://codeload.github.com/pahihu/cforthu/zip/masterThe author discloses that 8th depends on a number of third party libraries. Would this mean that each of those third parties would also have to make similar security claims to 8th?
For example, 8th uses an HTML5 parsing library from Google called gumbo-parser.
"Non-goals:
Security. Gumbo was initially designed for a product that worked with trusted input files only. We're working to harden this and make sure that it behaves as expected even on malicious input, but for now, Gumbo should only be run on trusted input or within a sandbox. Gumbo underwent a number of security fixes and passed Google's security review as of version 0.9.1."
source: https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser
It may be the case the only input parsed by 8th is trusted or "within a sandbox" but without the source code how would this be verified?
Wow, a closed source language. Good luck with that.
This has less import to the world than a cat video. Never getting that 5 minutes back.